Writing a blog about writing a book about old cowboy movies.

Elmore Leonard On 3:10 To Yuma (1957).

3:10 To Yuma (1957) came up today. (My wife flipped past it on TV this morning.) So I dug up something I’d squirreled away — an interview with writer Elmore Leonard.

Elmore Leonard: “Originally, I heard that Glenn Ford had turned down the role. He thought he was going to be the good guy, which Van Heflin played, the guy who is taking him to prison. But when he found out he was the bad guy, he wanted to do it. I thought, ‘God, he’s gonna be great.’ In the ‘40s and ‘50s, he was kind of a role model, someone you could enjoy or perhaps even imitate to some extent. I remember when we were in high school, we used to button our sport coats and single-breasted suits with the top two buttons because Glenn Ford buttoned his that way in Gilda.”

Ford’s performance in this one is one of the best in 50s Westerns, as good as Stewart in The Man From Laramie (1955) or Wayne in The Searchers (1956). And on the creepy scale, he’s right up there with Mitchum in Cape Fear (1962).

UPDATE: How dare I mention this film and not bring up Van Heflin? To me, this and Shane (1953) would make a nice double bill, with Heflin as shades of more or less the same character.

Ford was a great everyman and it’s easy to see why peopel could identify with him. I think he also had that quality of never seeming quite relaxed and, subconsciously at least, a lot of people can understand that feeling. Delmer Daves certainly knew how to bring out the best in the actor in their collaborations.

The scenes in the hotel in 3:10 with just Van Heflin and Ford holding the screen and demanding your attention are really well handled by both the two actors and Daves. That, along with the Felicia Farr and Ford scenes are a large part of what makes 3:10 such a great movie for me. Compare those sequences with their updates in Mangold’s remake and you can see a lot of why that film just doesn’t work.

Van Heflin as always is good in any role he plays, like his
character in “Shane”. But it is Ford underplaying the role
and making us think that things will not go well for Heflin,
is a classic. And only a few actors could have handled this,
and Ford pulled it off perfectly. You remember this film
in your head where good memories are stored.

Call me crazy, but I dislike Marlon Brando. I saw this movie several years ago, I remember it was hard to follow, not to mention Brando’s mumbles. He looks like a slob even in a western. I guess you can tell this one ain’t a favorite of mine.